A Labour MP who was suspended from her party for antisemitic social media posts has been promoted to be a shadow minister.
Jeremy Corbyn appointed Bradford West MP Naz Shah to his frontbench team on Tuesday to be shadow minister for women and equalities.
Ms Shah was readmitted to the party in July 2016, following a disciplinary process for the series of comments she made about Jews and Israel.
In August 2014, before she was an MP, she shared a link on Facebook that suggested spending “transportation costs” to move Israelis out of the Middle East.
The JC also revealed that she posted a tweet with a link to a blog which claimed Zionism had been used to “groom” Jews to “exert political influence at the highest levels of public office”.
In another post that year she appeared to liken Israel’s policies to those of Hitler.
After the posts emerged, Ms Shah told the BBC: “I wasn’t antisemitic, what I put out was antisemitic.” She called the posts “hurtful, inexcusable”.
She said she acknowledged “how stupid I was and how ignorant I was”, and wished she had apologised sooner.
“The truth is that some of the stuff I have since looked at and understood, I didn’t know at the time,” she said. “The language I used was antisemitic, it was offensive.”
Ms Shah stood down from the Commons Home Affairs committee but later rejoined after she was re-instated by the party and vowed to win back the Jewish community’s trust.
When she was re-instated, a Board of Deputies spokesman said: “Of all those suspended by the Labour Party for antisemitic actions, Naz Shah stands out as someone who has been prepared to apologise to the Jewish community at a local and national level, and make efforts to learn from her mistakes.
“In that regard, her reinstatement seems appropriate.”
Ms Shah doubled her majority in Bradford West at the 2017 general election.
During a hustings a few days before the election, she was heckled with cries of “Jew, Jew, Jew” after asserting Israel’s right to exist.
Ms Shah said: “Do I believe in Israel’s right to exist? I continue to stand by my statement that I believe in Israel’s right to exist.”
